The best thing about this concert was the exposure it gave to the charity Asthma UK. William Hurlstone, the pianist and composer whose centenary anniversary the Primrose Piano Quartet was celebrating, was unable to make a concert career because of asthma — and he died of the condition at the age of 30 in 1906.

The Piano Quartet in E minor, first performed just two years before his death, is propelled by youthful exuberance and a quality of daring that makes one suspect that a distinctive voice might well have emerged. But, in a blind testing, you’d be hard put to it to know whose was the brew. Could it be Brahms on a reckless day? Fauré after too much Pernod? Stanford in unfettered mood? The fingerprints are heavy, and so, at times, are the ideas: the third movement sounds like leprechauns dancing in gum boots, and the finale bowls along with confident period swagger.

The PPQ’s performance was dangerously cavalier. Finer focus and, particularly, finer tuning might have ensured one or two more performances of the piece, rather than hurling it back to obscurity.

The zeal of the PPQ is never in doubt. But how one longed for some relief from that relentlessly hard, bright light of the first violin; from the loud, lush rubato of the piano; from the sporadic tuning and articulation blurs of viola and cello. It made Lekeu’s unfinished (thank goodness) Quatuor avec Piano something of a trial, and made even Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C minor, after the interval, somewhat difficult to fathom. Projection is simply not all. This ensemble needs to search far more deeply into the structure and nuancing of what they play.

The evening ended with a little welcome light relief. The violinist Chihiro Ono and bassist Leon Bosch joined the PPQ for a rare performance of Roger Quilter’s frolicsome excursion into Hungary. His five-minute vignette Gipsy Life filters Magyar inflections through English politesse — yet is none the worse for that.